John Berger

although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.

Yet when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.

Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past.

When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. Who benefits from this deprivation? In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.

When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. Who benefits from this deprivation? In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.

Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.

From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.